1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the art of an electrical connector, and particularly to an electrical connector having a locker which can be moved to a position sandwiching a printed circuit board (PCB hereinafter) on which the electrical connector is mounted thereby more securely connecting the connector and the PCB together.
2. Description of Related Art
It is well known to provide a right angle connector mountable to a printed circuit board (hereinafter PCB), in which the connector has terminals perpendicularly engaging with respective electrical circuit traces of the PCB. The terminals may have right angle solder tails projecting from a housing of the connector and inserted into holes in the PCB, or right angle solder tails extending generally parallel to the PCB for surface mounting to circuit traces on the PCB. Such a connector has a problem that the electrical connections between the terminals and the circuit traces of the PCB often are subjected to external stresses, specially including rotating force which causes the connector to rotate about the PCB. Such a rotation may cause the electrical connections between the terminals and the PCB to break. To resolve this problem, U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,912discloses the use of a tail-aligning device mountable on the housing to protect the solder tails of the terminals and to stabilize the connector.
However, with the ever-increasing lower-profile trend of electrical connector, along with simplification in assembly of the connector, the tail-aligning device often is impractical and neither cost nor space effective, due to having a plenty of apertures for the terminals to extend through.
Hence, an improvement to resolve the problems of the prior art is required.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide an electrical connector which can be securely mounted to an edge of a PCB.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an electrical connector which has improved signal transmission performance.
In order to achieve the objects set forth, an electrical connector in accordance with the present invention comprises an insulative housing with a front surface and a rear surface thereby defining a mating direction from the front surface to the rear surface, and a locker. The insulative housing defines a contact-receiving passageways and channels extending in the mating direction. A plurality of contacts is secured in the contact-receiving passageways and channels. Projections are configured in three parallel rows on a bottom surface of the housing. The locker comprises an inner surface being attached to the housing and a plurality of grooves depressed from the inner surface. Each groove defines a protrusion to engage corresponding projections of the housing during mounting the connector to an edge of a PCB.
Before the connector is mounted to the edge of the PCB, the protrusions of the locker are positioned between first and second rows of the projections of the connector. After the connector is mounted to the edge of the PCB, the locker is moved toward the rear surface of the insulative housing of the connector to reach a finally assembled position at which the protrusions slide over third row of the projections and fixedly engage therewith. At the finally assembled position, the locker sandwiches the edge of the PCB, whereby the connector and the edge of the PCB are more securely connected together and a possible rotation of the connector about the PCB is prevented.
The contacts of the connector are divided into power contacts and signal contacts. The signal contacts include two differential pairs of signal contacts separated by three ground contacts whereby the problem of signal transmission skew/propagation problem can be effectively solved. One of the three ground contacts is located between the two pairs of signal contacts, and the other two are located respectively at two sides of the two pairs of signal contacts.